In his second big interview, this one with PBS Newshour’s Margaret Warner, Ford went even further than declaring an intimacy with these rebels. He stated flat-out that they were on America’s side, that their “agenda is compatible with our national security interests” but that we’ve betrayed them “because they don’t have the same resources that either Assad does or the Al-Qaeda groups in Syria do.”
Evidently very free indeed to speak his mind, Ford told both Amanpour and Warner something that has been an open secret in Washington for quite a while – namely, that the US State Department, from its current secretary on down to its lowliest Mideast analyst, believes Barack Obama is not only wrong about Syria but supremely disingenuous in arguing for why he is right. And yet, the reign of bullshit continues.
In a State Department press briefing held yesterday, spokesperson Marie Harf was asked about Ford’s embarrassing volte-face, and then went on what one journalist acquaintance of mine who was in the room described as a “tangent.” That tangent included a series of familiar but no less remarkable observations.
1. Syria was not a problem that the United States can or should solve “on its own.” So much for the “Friends of Syria,” then.
2. A diplomatic solution featuring bilateral accommodation with Russia was still the way forward. Therefore it doesn’t matter that Russian government officials, oligarchs, and institutions are now under US sanctions or that Moscow continues to veto UN Security Council resolutions on Syria while also sending more and better-grade military equipment to the regime.
3. “Some institutions” need to be “maintained” in order to avoid anarchy. Leaving aside the fact that there is no such thing in Syria as an “institution,” Harf declined to delineate the ones she thought worth hanging onto. But they very likely include the mukhabarat, the Syrian army, and Iranian-trained and -financed proxies such as Hezbollah and the National Defense Forces. She went on to mouth the White House catechism that there is no military solution to this conflict because who would take over (except for the foregoing institutions, of course) if the regime collapsed? The extremists, that’s who. Harf did not add that these extremists are now engaged in mortal combat with the rebels the United States has known and been working with – but insufficiently supporting – for years.
4. Judging by this gem of an on-the-record statement, I’d wager that Harf is in a far worse state of tortured conscience than Ford was in March. CNN and PBS, take note: “We don’t think it’s in our national security interests to send American troops all over the world, putting boots on the ground everywhere trying to affect outcomes in other countries… And we’ve been very clear that that’s not in our national interest to send 18-year-old kids from Ohio to Damascus to try to promote regime change there.”
This poor woman, still on the payroll, did not, because she could not, point to anyone in the Syrian opposition, other Western governments, or the multinational class of interventionist policy analysts and commentators who has ever suggested putting boots on the ground or sending 18-year-old kids from Ohio to Damascus.
“Don’t do stupid shit” is being boasted about as the new witless mantra of the professional bullshit artists when really it’s just the latest embodiment of how full of it they all are.
